Carlo Di Palma

12:02AM BST 17 Jul 2004

Carlo Di Palma, who died on July 9 aged 79, was the Italian cinematographer principally responsible for the way Woody Allen's films looked in the 1980s and 1990s; he and Allen worked together on 11 pictures between Hannah and Her Sisters in 1986 and Deconstructing Harry in 1997, during which time only three of Allen's films were photographed by other cameramen.

Di Palma had come to prominence in the 1960s, when he was director of photography on two of Michelangelo Antonioni's most experimental films, The Red Desert (1964) and Blow-Up (1966); The Red Desert was Antonioni's first colour movie and Blow-Up his first in English.

In The Red Desert, Di Palma collaborated with Antonioni on the development of a colour palette that would mirror the heroine's disturbed vision of reality. This involved a rejection of actual colours in favour of "psychological" ones. As a result, the natural settings (trees, grass and the like) were painted to the exact hues Antonioni sought to evoke. The Red Desert was thus the most non-naturalistic film that had been attempted.

Blow-Up, because it was in English, impressed an even wider public and alerted Hollywood to the existence in Italy of cameramen who could change audiences' expectations of the way mainstream movies should look. It is no coincidence that, in the wake of Di Palma's success, his fellow Italian Vittorio Storaro came to the fore with The Conformist in 1970, and subsequently dominated the Oscars scene with award-winning work in such films as Apocalypse Now in 1979 and The Last Emperor in 1987. Di Palma himself, however, was never honoured in this way; and under his pseudonym, Charles Brown, he was never acknowledged either.

The work he did for Woody Allen was very varied in approach, embracing nostalgia in Radio Days (1987), fantasy in Alice (1990) and even an attempt to resuscitate the conventions of the musical in Everyone Says I Love You (1996). Perhaps his most audacious experiment was in Allen's Shadows and Fog (1992), which was a successful pastiche of early Ingmar Bergman movies such as Sawdust and Tinsel and of the German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s. Like all films in that tradition, it was shot in black and white, making extensive use of shadows and chiaroscuro, a convention of which Di Palma proved an instant master.

Carlo Di Palma was born in Rome on April 17 1925, the son of working-class parents who had a hard struggle for subsistence. His mother was forced to supplement their meagre income by selling flowers on the Spanish Steps.

From an early age Carlo was mad about films, although those he was able to see during the war were tailored to the official fascist line. When Mussolini fell, and films began surreptitiously to be made attempting a more realistic depiction of Italian life in the early- to mid-1940s, Carlo Di Palma was among the first to enrol. This was how he came to work, albeit anonymously, on Obsessione, Luchino Visconti's first film, now recognised as a big stepping stone on the way to the movement later identified as neo-realism.

Di Palma's early career was closely associated with this movement. He worked, for example, on Roberto Rossellini's Paisa (1946), an episodic picture now acknowledged as a classic of the liberation of Italy from the fascist yoke. He was an assistant to Gianni Di Venanzo, a cameraman who graduated from apprentice work on early neo-realist pictures to important contributions to the later films of Antonioni and Fellini.

After winning his cinematographic spurs, however, Di Palma largely turned his back on the realist tradition, opting instead for a kind of heightened realism, using filters and different lenses to add a psychological dimension.

His first films as a cameraman were forgettable (the very first was a 1954 costume drama called Ivan). But in 1960 he began to make his mark with La Lunga Notte del '43, directed by Florestano Vancini. This wartime drama was pitched midway between realism and melodrama and won a prize at the 1960 Venice Film Festival, but is now almost forgotten.

The Red Desert and Blow-Up, the two films he shot for Michelangelo Antonioni in the mid-1960s, propelled his career into another dimension. In Blow-Up, David Hemmings puzzles over what he thinks he sees in a snapshot as a murder. Zoom lenses enable him and the audience to get closer to what actually happened, but nothing is categorically revealed. We believe it or do not believe it according to how we interpret the photographic evidence.

This sequence is mirrored at the end, in which Antonioni and Di Palma show a simple series of exchanges across a tennis net. Time after time we hear the racket strike the ball, yet nothing happens on court. Is what we call reality only true because we perceive it?

Di Palma attempted only once to direct a movie himself - Teresa the Thief (1973), starring Monica Vitti, the actress he had first met on The Red Desert and who was to become his constant companion.

Under his guidance she transformed her on-screen personality, hitherto languid, into something predominantly comic. They never married, however; instead he married Adriana Chiesa, the exporter of Italian films. There were no children.